


Undoings

by KlayterMcCabe



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 14:05:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5873308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KlayterMcCabe/pseuds/KlayterMcCabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One by one, they all fail to kill Kylo Ren. Well, almost all of them fail. (four little snippets about murder)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Poe Dameron

Obviously Poe did not _plan_ on a suicide mission, but he isn't a man to turn opportunity away when it arises. Nor is he a man to get overly attached to his ship—it's been years since there was a "his" ship anyway, these days it's all stolen-property-this or Resistance-commandeered-that—but when he realizes that he's going down, his pang of heartfelt panic isn't only about the destruction of his own body, but also this great metal body around him, which is older than he is and has probably seen stranger things.

There's not time for his life to pass before his eyes, because he's too busy steering his burning X-wing to where it can do the most damage: the command bridge of Kylo Ren's ship. He doesn't expect to survive the ensuing conflagration, but at some point his eyes open and he spits blood and the roar in his ears is a post-explosion tinnitus he's experienced before.

If he could laugh, he would, because you shouldn't be able to say "I've survived multiple explosions" without laughing.

When he raises his head, Kylo Ren is looking down at him, and the world is on fire.

His heart is willing to make a sarcastic remark, but his body fails him. He feels his own thoughts being raked through, and he and Kylo Ren form a remarkable bubble of calm, as around them the wounded scream and Stormtroopers try to evacuate the bridge and stop the damage from spreading. If it doesn't hurt as much this time to have another person in his brain, that's only because the shock is wearing off, and he is intensely aware of the pain in his body, both what's already there and what's rising as inevitable as a tide.

"You and Hux are not dissimilar," says Kylo Ren, and the reason Poe can hear him, the reason his voice isn't distorted despite his mask, is that he's speaking directly into Poe's mind. "Both of you blindly following the paths your parents laid out, imagining it to be for the greater good. I suppose it would be interesting for you to converse, if you wouldn't be too busy trying to slit each other's throats to speak."

Poe coughs blood, and his hand twitches at his side.

"In a better world," Ren continues idly, "it would be interesting for more enemies to have the opportunity to converse, don't you think?"

But the question isn't only rhetorical, it's grotesque: he can afford idle speculation, and Poe is dying. Poe realizes this so suddenly that he wonders if he's thinking this thought himself, or if Kylo Ren put it there.

"I wouldn't have anything to say to you," Poe sputters. He already wishes he was unconscious, and the pain is still building.

Kylo Ren tilts his head and looks down on him. This way he has of rifling through people's thoughts: it hurts, but it doesn't have to hurt. Poe had felt Rey doing it to him only once, feather light, something she'd meant as a reassurance but that had made him feel sick at the time. He recognizes the difference, now. The Force doesn't have to hurt you. He thinks this thought as loudly as he can: _Rey barely knows what she's doing, and she's already better at it than you_.

He expects this to enrage, but Kylo Ren's tone in his head is more complicated than simple anger.

"I know," he says. "And sometimes, I'm afraid."

Poe throws his whole body forward, and he makes it to his feet. He doesn't have a plan—General Organa always told him that his own faith in his ability to improvise was his greatest strength and greatest weakness—but he wants to spend what blood he has left to spend fighting Kylo Ren, not lying in the wreckage and waiting to die.

"This isn't a fight," Kylo Ren murmurs, and Poe doesn't know if he's hearing the words with his ears or in his head. His trembling fingers reach for his blaster.

Kylo Ren runs him through, the lightsaber silent against the backdrop of so much other noise.

"It's a slaughter," Ren says to Dameron's corpse.


	2. General Hux

Hux's response to stress is to sleep less and do more, and sometimes to drink to excess. He's risen to the rank of General with this as his primary strength: when there is a problem, don't rest until it's gone.

Kylo Ren is a problem. He's been a problem since Supreme Leader Snoke first brought him aboard, but one that Hux was explicitly ordered to ignore. Forced to contemplate this problem from so many angles—when it's throwing temper tantrums, when it's pitching Hux's plans into disarray, when it's disrupting tactical meetings with emotional meltdowns—Hux came to a new conclusion:

Supreme Leader Snoke is a problem.

Of course a multi-pronged problem must be handled one step at a time, and it's difficult to assassinate a problem that can read your mind. Hux's advantage here is that something is wrong with him. He's missing something essential that other people have; it's possible his father lacked it, too. He recognizes emotions, of course, and some of them he even feels: anger, humiliation, fear. But this blankness in him isn't only a matter of affect, and he's watched it unsettle Kylo Ren in the past. He thinks of himself as a snake trapped among mammals, and with dumb animal wisdom Kylo Ren knows to avoid him unless they're forced together. Reading Hux's mind is unpleasant, and eventually Kylo Ren stops doing it.

Force-users are not sorcerers, though that's what they often seem like. They're men, and they can be killed.

General Hux starts attempting to assassinate him almost idly, with various poisons. Twice, Kylo Ren grows terribly sick. After that, he stops accepting food from the staff. In a show of solidarity, General Hux steps up security and has a few Stormtroopers executed for failing to adequately protect or inspect their supply lines. What Hux learns is: as long as the people trying to kill Kylo Ren don't know what they're doing, neither does Kylo Ren.

What the First Order can give the world is peace, and a certain kind of freedom. Hux imagines a world where everyone has a place, and no one worthy is left behind. Utopia is possible—has _always_ been possible—if only everyone will share the same perfect vision. Sith talk, "embracing the Dark Side," "nurturing your anger," is all ridiculous at best, and sickening at worst. It's a cancer in the First Order, something they needed in the beginning to grow strong fast, but already metastasizing.

Hux culls a few susceptible Stormtroopers from the Corps and begins them on a new regimen of conditioning, something so private that not even Phasma is kept in the loop. It will be best to eliminate Kylo Ren when he's out on a mission, so that afterwards he can wipe out the Stormtroopers responsible and begin working on the problem of Supreme Leader Snoke with the alibi of being light years away from the tragedy.

Hux never learns what went wrong or how Kylo Ren found out. He simply wakes in the early hours of the morning, unable to breathe.

Kylo Ren is in his cabin, the glare of his helmet visible in the dim emergency lighting that keeps every room on the ship from ever being completely dark.

"A _snake_ , you think of yourself," Kylo Ren says, and Hux feels him then, rooting out Hux's most personal secrets, cutting into his most subtle plans. "What an apt image."

He releases Hux's throat, and Hux collapses, gasping. He knows he should be afraid, but he isn't. The first regret that strikes him is ridiculous: _I always thought I'd die in my uniform_.

"It isn't _your_ uniform, is it?" Kylo Ren asks. "It's Supreme Leader Snoke's, and you've managed to disgrace it."

He squeezes Hux's windpipe shut.

"You puppet," Hux manages to spit, before words are no longer possible. If Ren kills him now, he has minutes to live. If the plan is for Supreme Leader Snoke to make an example of him, he might live for days.

It would be better to die quickly.

"I'm not incapable of mercy," says Kylo Ren, but Hux barely hears him. What he's thinking, as he dies, is: _This isn't the empire I wanted to rule_.

Kylo Ren looks genuinely surprised. "But General," he says softly. "You were never going to rule."


End file.
